Sensor and control concept for a wearable robot for manual load handling assistance

Current wearable robots mostly focus on applications in military, rehabilitation and load lifting in the health sector, while they are hardly used in industry and manufacturing. In this paper, a sensor and control concept for a wearable robot for assistance in manual handling of loads in industry is presented. Special requirements such as low costs, direct contact between the human and the load and easy set-up are addressed. A wall-mounted test stand of an actuated elbow joint was built up to evaluate the proposed sensors and control algorithms. By using a torque sensor in the elbow joint as reference it is shown that low cost force sensors in the forearm can be used to measure the human-robot interaction. A torque-based and a velocity-based impedance control approach are compared which allow the user to move freely while not handling any loads and which also allow to incorporate a human command signal for regulation of force support. The former is shown to be superior to the position-based approach. Further, the influence of the human impedance characteristics onto stability of the controllers is discussed.